I know that vinyl has better sq than cd's (well that's what i've heard anyway) and that got me thinking has anyone ever installed a turntable in a car? I remember a lexus ad from a couple of years had a turntable in the boot implying that it was a very smooth ride but I have no idea whether a turntable in a moving car has been done before and whether it's a practical option.

spin some discs at a CAA Meet.

otherwise...

ummm no, no and no....
with the amount of weight you'd have to put on the arm for it not to jump you will be cutting new grooves into your records,
if it spins at all that is.

I've seen it done, in the States a guy had two set up in his boot, mixed at shows...

In the late 50's-early 60's there was an American car, soem big tank, that had the option of a factory underdash turntable. You could also but a similar thing aftermarket around the same time. I can only guess how bad they sounded! As they say, everything's been done before!

it was an option in the early Ford Thunderbirds in the USA...i have seen one,it sits on the transmission tunnel

Who said vynl sounds better than CD?

it would most certainly have to depend on what you were playing. the sound would be different. prob. along the lines of playing a tape

Vinyl certainly isn't as accurate as digital but they do sound good. Some people just prefer the "warmer" sound of vinyl which many of us like to refer to as distortion or lack of dynamic range

[ January 03, 2003, 15:05: Message edited by: jambo ]

Im sure it would be a nice addition at shows

My lp12 sounds great at home, but I think in the car it would be a disaster!!!!!!!!

Disaster is the word that keeps comming to mind....

Phillips made a turntable in the 60's that used to fit under the dash of Mini's. Paul McCartney had one in his Wood and Picket mini.

Brad

Well there is a turn table of sorts that may work in a car. I cannot rem who makes it but it does not have a needle but insted uses light to see the grove and digitaly produces the sound from that. I read a review on it in a dance mag, it was designed to play very valuable old records and not damage them, so might work in a car.
From mem I think they were like $30 000 or so!!!

If you want to mix in your car, get cd mixing decks, I've seen it done and it all fitted in the glove box.

I dont linger into the SQ forums often (SPL LORD) but I think Ian was pretty much asking if you'd score more points if you had a Turntable in a SQ comp ie. stationary car in the pitts.

But what ppl were summing up it sounds like a fully digital singal is better, but Ian sounds like you have ditched the state-of-the-art Mini-Disk for Vinyl I think you should have a go at it!!

i have seen a car with a turntable in it. we are talking back in the days when i was a teenager which was well before most members here where born.
it was a store demo car that had the turn table set up and i didnt think the car was driven much, it was mainly a shop monster.

putting a turntable into a car nowadays would be hard. i imagine the blast from subs would upset the turntable to a huge degree. turntables in cars was a thing that also was before seperate speakers and sub woofers was around as well.

i was under the impression that vinyl was better quality than cd's because it holds a pure analog sound wave. wheras cd audio is not a pure sound wave because digital is always "blocky"
it's just that vynil isn't practical.
i'm sure it sounds a damn sight better than a tape.
dont see why you couldn't do it for stationary listening. i.e. at comps, but u couldn't on the road, because any vibration would make it skip.
dvd audio is the next step in quality from cd because it's got a better "resolution" for want of a better word.

Well analogue signals would be great if it weren't for reality Unfortunately things aren't perfect and any system will have some noise introduced into it, or just not be of sufficient fidelity to record audio to the full degree that humans can percieve.

Digital systems break things down into distinct samples at intervals of *sufficient* frequency that we record what we need to reproduce the audio signal faithfully (for our purposes). Noise resistance and controllability of digital systems means that they can be designed to be far superior than clunky mechanical methods like turntables (OK it's not that bad but if LPs held more information than CD's we'd all have turntables hooked up to our computers now wouldn't we?). The most basic feature is that noise has to be greater than a certain threshold to corrupt digital data whereas, in real life, analogue information is ALWAYS corrupted or distorted to some amount since some noise is always present.

You don't actually have little squarish waves coming out of your CD player either There's a bit of simple theory behind it but the 5 second version of it is that although the recorded signal is quantized (ie. blocky ), some well designed analogue filtering on the output removes that and leaves us with the original signal.

Uhh yeah, i guess we need a website with some diagrams here, it's harder to explain in simple terms than i thought

DVD audio isn't necessarily better either, in fact in most cases it's worse. It depends on what you call DVD audio really, if it's the soundtrack of a movie on DVD for example then it's compressed, similar to an MP3 (not normally compressed as much though).
However, DVDs are still digital medium (digital is digital), their increased capacity can mean that they could be used to store raw audio at more bits/sample, at a higher frequency (although i don't know why) or in more channels but that's about it - nothing that can't be done on a (slightly modified) regular CD.

i highly doubt that too many members here have ever heard a decent turntable. a brand called lynn was pretty much the doyen of all turntables for many years along with other brands such as rotel and mac. these sort of turntables had to be mounted on a special wall bracket that bolted to the wall and came with a seperate pre amp to convert from 100 to 500 mv output. purists usually considered amps built in line converters as pos.
you can still buy these i think from the purist shops, i think their about 3 grand plus. thats a lot of dough to play vinyl on i reckon!